by Matt Lee
Quick Summary
Librarians are frequently asked to teach students the mechanics of creating citations.
Librarians are frequently asked to teach students the mechanics of creating citations. Whatever our personal feelings on the importance of following the minute details of a specific formatting structure (from strict rule-abider all the way to citation anarchist) we can probably all agree that getting students to understand why citations exist is critical.
A wonderful post to a wonderful acrlframe list conversation provides a compelling analogy. Instructors at Oviatt Library at California State University – Northridge (CSUN), including Susanna Eng-Ziskin, compare the citation of a journal or magazine to a television show. Here’s a snippet of Eng-Ziskin’s list post:
I ask them [students] to name a show that they like (or I use my go to, “Grey’s Anatomy,” as most are familiar with it still). I ask them if I asked them to watch a specific episode of Grey’s Anatomy, and I said it was a great episode and there were surgeries, attractive people had sex in the hospital, someone died, it was emotionally manipulative, and I cried at the end, would they know which episode I was referring to? And of course they say no. I ask them why and they respond because those things happen in most episodes of GA. So then I ask them if I say they need to watch season 5, episode 11, and in particular a scene that’s about 20 minutes in, could they then figure it out? And they say yes of course, because I’ve given them more information and context.
So then I make the connections between seasons / volumes, episodes / issues, and scenes / articles. They usually seem to understand it once we’ve talked about it that way.
Oviatt Library at CSUN also created an infographic to expand on this theme: How Scholarly Articles are Published. The whole analogy seems relatable to students and lets them come to the “why” of citations naturally.
The broader list conversation on this topic was also fascinating and ranged from providing other examples of citation-teaching strategies to discussions on the existential need for citation formats at all. Visit the acrlframe list archives and locate the “Teaching citation in a framework-y way” thread from November 2016 for more.
